Sunday, June 09, 2013

It was 1954. I was staying in a college hostel in Bombay, along with a bunch of struggling medical students. On an idle afternoon I assembled the ingredients for this photograph: the skull and skeletal hand from one of the college classrooms; cards, cigarette packet, "liquor" bottle (actually hair oil), money, from here and there. I think the hat must have belonged to one of the two or three Ph.D. students, older than I was, who led secretive lives in private rooms in one section of the hostel.

I was consumed by an urgent search for the meaning of life: was it contained in principles of idealism, which I found variable; or in all the opposites, which only confounded my despair and loneliness. I felt embarrassed at the thought that my lazy assemblage of stuff into a photograph could be interpreted as my claim to uprightness, and as judgmental of an "unprincipled, amoral" life, with the certainty of retribution.

Today I look back on the unremitting hardship I had imposed on my mind and, through it, on my body, between the ages of 12 and 20, to find a definitive, ABSOLUTE answer, which would not or could not alter with time, place or people, but could remain forever a constant, and therefore the ultimate, as much as the only, explanation. I feel a certain amusement and ruefulness at my naivete, which time and again criss-crossed this search to articulate, simply and unimpeachably.

For me now, when I am at the end of my life, the mystery of how this picture found its way into my hands is far greater than the meaning of its origin, and the meaning of life as we know it, or as it exists anywhere in the universe; and the meaning of the universe itself.

Anyone who has read this far, and would be more than just amused, and would wish to take on my claim, is most earnestly requested to communicate it to me, without any reservations. I would be available to respond fully at all times.

Friday, June 07, 2013

I began to write about the coming environmental destruction of the world as far back as 1965, in an article first published in the Chennai-based magazine Aside. (click here for the article, which I re-posted on this blog, along with my photographs, old and new, in June 2010.) I also wrote two other blog posts on the subject (click here and here).

I am mentioning these posts because of a recent article in The Hindu newspaper, doubtless one among myriads of erudite and much-researched and scientifically fact-based reports, concerning the disastrous news that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere touched 400 parts per million on 9 May. This level of atmospheric carbon dioxide had been fixed as a hypothetical benchmark, a point of no return for climate change. Now it is no longer hypothetical: it is increasingly palpable, and the threat clear, real, and present.

A race towards climate catastrophe

Photo: AP
KEELING OVER: The pace of warming of the globe is making it increasingly difficult for ecosystems and species to adapt.

The Earth is now in uncharted territory as atmospheric carbon
dioxide has shot past the 400 ppm mark. There is no more room for
manoeuvre

When Brian Lara scored a scintillating 400 not out in Antigua in April
2004, it seemed his score would remain unchallenged for the foreseeable
future. But we now have another player on the scene who has scored 400,
and threatens to go past that number effortlessly — carbon dioxide (CO2); CO2
levels in the atmosphere touched 400 parts per million (ppm) on May 9.
Its symbolic significance is huge, its actual import is even bigger, for
three reasons.

Impact on life cycles

One, the recent pace at which CO2 levels have been rising to
reach 400 ppm. When Charles Keeling [the world’s leading authority on
atmospheric greenhouse gas accumulation and climate science pioneer]
began measuring atmospheric CO2 in March 1958, and through the 1960s, CO2
emissions were found to be rising at a little over half a ppm a year.
The world economy was at a much lower level than today notwithstanding
post-War growth, and carbon emissions were commensurately lower. By the
late 1990s this had changed, spurred primarily, but not exclusively, by
the shifting of manufacturing to China, and capitalism’s desire to cut
costs of energy inputs and labour. CO2 rise in the first
decade of this century made the collective jaw of climate scientists
drop. Despite the world economic crisis since 2007, annual carbon
dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have been rising in recent
years, to 32 billion tonnes (plus another four billion tonnes from
deforestation and even more of other gases). Eight billion tonnes of CO2
in the atmosphere equals 1 ppm. So even though the Earth absorbs — is
being forced to absorb — twice as much CO (roughly 17-18 billion tonnes a
year currently) as it used to 50 years ago, atmospheric CO2 levels have been galloping three times as fast, at a little over two ppm a year for the last decade.

This is 20,000 times the long-term natural rate at which carbon dioxide
has gone into and out of the atmosphere as part of the carbon cycle. A
consequence, usually rendered invisible as we tend to be so
anthropocentric, is the oceans getting more acidic, with harmful effects
on corals and some marine species.

This pace of emissions and consequent warming is also making it
increasingly difficult for ecosystems and species to adapt. A metasurvey
by Prof. Camille Parmesan [University of Texas, Austin] of 866
published studies reported species across the world struggling to cope
with disruptions in the life cycles of predators and prey, of insect
pollinators and flowering plants. Birds are laying their first eggs
earlier. As their habitat gets warmer, other species are trying to move
away from the Equator or climb higher. Consequently, mountaintop and
polar species have suffered contractions in their range or “been the
first groups in which whole species have gone extinct due to recent
climate change.”

Two, as we reach 400 ppm and beyond, we are going farther away from safe levels of CO2.
Albeit a minority view, but a growing one, safe has been deemed as 350
ppm or lower. In its first articulation in 2008, [leading climate
scientist] James Hansen and others wrote that “if humanity wishes to
preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to
which life on Earth is adapted, … CO2will need to be reduced … to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that” (“Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?,” The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2008, 2, pp. 217-31). This paper provides the intellectual basis for the worldwide campaign to reduce CO2, headed by the organisation, 350.org.

Temperature regulator

Three, the influence of CO2 levels on the Earth’s temperatures and hence climate over the past 50 million years should give us pause. In The Long Thaw (Princeton
2009), Professor David Archer, who works on the global carbon cycle at
the University of Chicago, writes: “The similarity between CO and
temperature in [the] Antarctica is jaw-dropping,” a causal link he says
that’s even stronger than that between smoking and lung cancer, “kind of
a gold standard in the medical world.” Falling CO2 levels contributed to the formation of ice caps on the Antarctic 34 million years ago. As CO2
levels fell further, to roughly 240 ppm three million years ago,
temperatures fell in their wake sufficiently for ice to form in the
Arctic. That’s why Arctic ice is now the first to go. I have not come
across any work on the potential impact of ice-free Arctic summers on
India’s climate, but you can bet your last rupee they will be
considerable. CO2 was also one of two big factors in the
Earth moving in and out of Ice Age glacials over the past 2.5 million
years. It is this regulator of the Earth’s temperature that we have been
shortsightedly fiddling with, and pushed beyond the realms of human
experience.

We don’t want to go much beyond 400 ppm. CO2 has one quality of the other great batsman of the last 25 years — longevity. A significant portion of CO2
emitted remains in the atmosphere for several millennia. Climate change
is also largely irreversible for a thousand years after emissions stop.

(Nagraj Adve is an activist based in Delhi and works on issues connected with global warming. E-mail: nagraj.adve@gmail.com)

Saturday, June 01, 2013

I envied the terraced village, ensconced, with residents whom I imagined or maybe fantasized, living simple, uncluttered, innocent lives; going about their days and nights without the questions, bafflements, perplexities of urbane existence in the fast lanes of incremental incomprehension, struggling unceasingly, losing battles.

But then my picture captured the contrast in the foreground, of fragments of advanced civilisation. I did not have the heart to just show the village without them, nor with them. So here are both the pictures. If I find viewers who choose one or the other, and communicate to me their own empathy for one or the other or both, I would be grateful.